“... 117 cardinals to the chapel where they will vote on the succession. Of the last image, Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, says to himself that ‘it could have been the motorcade of a dictator.’An early shot establishes three of the leading candidates in the coming election by closing in on their faces. They are Cardinals Bellini (Stanley ...”

“... staining the magical purity of those early performances. In The Passion of Montgomery Clift, Amy Lawrence idiosyncratically prefers those neglected post-accident films, resistant to their mood of dejection, but alive to Clift’s quieter genius. It’s a preference that fits her method. We all know about Clift; but ...”

“... outing to the races at Longchamps; ‘black-eyed Susan’, the New Mexican cow beloved by D.H. Lawrence: these are the things that stay in the mind when diagnoses and depreciations are forgotten. Jeffrey Meyers, who has done solid biographies of Lawrence and Hemingway and has now done one for Conrad, is particularly good ...”

“... the frantic requirements of the learned armies who on this topic dispute by night. Ultimately his Lawrence is a genuine scholar, a man of irresistible charm, a sympathiser who genuinely cared for the Arabs, but also a shocking fabricator, though more a man who told lies than a malign liar, a surprisingly good soldier (he stresses the excellence of ...”

“... The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey in 1957 was one of the causes célèbres of the post-war years. Apart from sex, it had everything. Adams was a fashionable Eastbourne doctor. Portly. With a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Charged with murdering one of his rich old women patients, for a chest of silver. There were strong hints she was not his only victim ...”

“... Never trust the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an interviewer once asked Larkin ...”

“... he mused later, ‘I might just as well have cut everything out.’ But he was never caught, as Lawrence was to be, in the trap of a readership that supposed sex to be his special thing. Openness about it was so happily equivocal with him that it became a kind of privacy: ‘shy and unseen’ indeed, but shedding a great glow of animation on everything the ...”

“... Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John Kampfner described Cook as an isolated figure forced to recognise both that he would never succeed Blair as party leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore ...”

“... not make readers fear that they are being lured to yet another study of the great man himself. Lawrence’s Women really is about the women in his life. They are not just lining the route. Neither should readers suspect that the word ‘intimate’ in the subtitle means that they are going to be told more about ...”

“... the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became ...”

“... Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, should have taken their feminine image from Richardson-Clarissa. As John Mullan shows in his useful and scholarly book, the early prestige of Richardson went underground, his ‘fairer and better sex’ taking on its vulgar Victorian form, but also appearing metamorphosed in George Eliot’s measured approval (‘we have fallen ...”

“... turn’ in an essay published in Social History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, two of Stedman Jones’s recent PhD students, insisted that Mayfield and Thorne had entirely misunderstood their mentor’s work, which they felt should be judged not in terms of its theoretical affiliations but according to an ...”

“... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...”

“... three most prominent Oxford professors of English since the war have all been populist pretenders. John Carey, scourge of Modernist ‘intellectuals’ and reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency. Terry Eagleton, with his blokeish binarisms and comic’s ...”

“... a couple of months before he embarked on the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence gave voice – as he often did – to the hatred he felt for ‘our most modern world’. Tin cans and ‘imitation tea’ feature prominently on his list of things not to like about being ‘most modern’. Tin cans often featured on such lists, either ...”